Archives for April 2016

WHY, WHAT, WHERE, WHO, HOW

HEADMEND may be a bit of a trite name for something that’s as intricate and as delicate and important as your emotional self – your ‘character of feeling you’ – but I’m embarking on a gig to try to use the language of the everyday person. That’s something I’m less used to than speaking and writing in technical terms (as I often do).

I’ve called it HeadMend because it’s easier to get that we’re talking about your subconscious self; – the hidden mind that generates all sorts of problems in life – and the solution to those problems, by the way. Most people think that all that relates to the brain, so “head” is what I’ve called this blog. If you have a head that needs a little mending, let’s go right ahead and do that – or at least, understand more about exactly what has to be mended.

Besides, if I named this blog “HeartMend” I’d be attracting the date-seeking population. Not such a bad idea, actually, since meeting up with a partner and maintaining a great relationship relies pretty much on what sort of deeper emotional relationship you have with yourself. Yes, there’ll be an article or two about that subject, as well.

And if I called this blog, “Amygdala-Hippocampal-Pathway-Mend” … well, nobody would read it.

OK, I digress. The form that this blog will take will be that it’s loaded with articles and opinion pieces from me; that is, written by me. What gives me the right to do so? Well, I’ve been in the business of helping people ‘mend’ their emotional states for almost forty years. If you want, you can read a bit about me on theabout mepage of this site, orhere .

Here’s a short list of expected HeadMend posts, scattered throughout categories:

Quotes. I love quotes that have been written by others, often long ago. They frequently have “restored meaning,” in that they can have modern situations attributed to them, but the quotes themselves have been forgotten or ignored. I’ll always explain the reason I’ve given the quote.

Articles. Apart from my own, I will be posting articles by others. I’ll be careful about these, making sure they ‘fit’ the aim and focus of this blog site. They may be included in full, or I may offer links to them elsewhere.

News. You won’t see many of these but if I see that, for instance, a pharmaceutical company CEO has been driven nuts by his own drugs, I’ll want to talk about it.

Videos. Same as articles, really. Most will be by others, and occasionally, I will post my own video.

Guest writers. From time to time, we’ll see a piece from someone I invite to share their knowledge or expertise.

Books. Not many of these, but if I come across something that can generally be informative and educational about “the affect mind” then, I’ll say so with a short review.

Most people read only the beginning and sometimes the end of an article, so I’ll do my best to be succinct and exacting in opening sentences (to let you know the content) and post an article with a ‘more-link:’ you know the one, “more …” or “continue reading …” or “go to …”

CAVEAT LECTOR … (caveat lector = caution to the reader).

Throughout this blog site, there will appear regular references, through hyperlinks, to pages elsewhere that are significantly more academic or ‘profound’ than the usual tone of this site and its blogs. They are included for the curious, or those readers who wish to delve deeper into the conceptual structures of the work I do. Please feel free to either embrace or reject such ‘leading to’ the information.

In any case, if you are someone who is interested in what drives every person (yes, even you) from a deeper inner affect (emotional) perspective, then I hope you’ll enjoy HeadMend in days, weeks and months to come.

The Meaning of ‘Private’ in Therapy

Throughout the 30 year development of Af-x and ECR, the notion of what ‘privacy’ really means has been fraught with misunderstanding. I wish there was another word in the English language that could be used to indicate the specificity of what private in affectology means. One of my tasks could very well be to find another more precise word, or look to other languages and reinterpret back into English (Greek, perhaps). Watch this space.

Because of the long socio-professional installation as to what ‘private’ designates, we all tend to relate it to one thing, and one thing alone – the act of non-disclosure by a psychotherapist (or doctor or lawyer, etc) of the substance or topic of the matter that has led a client to that professional. This has led many a client of Af-x or clinical affectology to assume that they know exactly what we mean by ‘mind privacy.’

In affectology, what we are promoting is the notion that the part of the affect unconscious that our work is specific to, is unavailable even to your conscious mind. That is … ABSOLUTELY! We may call this phenomenon “auto-seclusive,” meaning hidden even from yourself. This is an understandable position. We have been conditioned in our culture to believe that everything about who and what we are, is definable and can be analyzed to some extent. The very strong contention of affectology – supported by the affective neuroscience – is that there are aspects of your unconscious emotional core that drive your adult characteristics and have a great deal of influence over who and how you are today.

Here’s a few lines from one of the Af-x program descriptions. The use of the term UPGs refers merely to our defining of the emotional core. In this case, the acronym refers to Unconscious Preverbal Governors.

I do not operate from UPGs, do I?

WHY THE QUESTION ARISES: Most people are not comfortable with the idea that “something” outside their awareness and ability to analyze is governing their lives. Adult ego can rarely accept that there are forces that cannot be controlled through an act of conscious will.

WHAT AFFECTOLOGY SHOWS: The territory of the affectology approach is exclusively the unconscious or subconscious. Unconscious Preverbal Governors (UPGs) operate beyond our ability to define or control. Present-life problems and issues would be easy to moderate and change if we were driven only by conscious reason and will. The likely cause of indefinable affect habits is the presence of UPGs.

So, are any of us really in charge of ourselves? We’d like to think so. Know thyself? Affectology contends that you can never do such a thing, fully. But also contends that it’s no big deal to change your emotional and behavioral PATTERNS without micro-analysis of the depths of your affect code. For a more robust look at why that may be the case, you can go here.

It’s common for intending clients of Af-x to say things like, “I want to get into my subconscious to find out why I do the things I do” or “I know how to go to my subconscious – I’ve done it before. I want to fix things about it.” Of course, these people have been conditioned by contemporary thought, to expect that the affect unconscious is analyzable, that they must actively bring about some modification to ‘what’s going on within’.

As much as I’d like to accommodate them, it remains true, and I have to make the statement, “can’t be done.”

I’d much rather talk about you in this blog, but I feel it might be useful to say a bit about where I came from and how I came to construct the ‘affectological view’ of human behavior, yours and mine and everybody’s. Admit it; I seem a little bit “off-standard.” That’s because I am, and I want to show you that there’s a very definitive path that got us ‘here’ and why it has inestimable value to the idea of emotional balance for everybody, and snips the hubris of current psychotherapy a bit.

I know it seems like a personal boast or some sort of litany of personal achievement on my part, but these are important ‘steps’ along my road toward what is now a proven and effective form of ‘guidance toward perfect self help’.

My first taste of ‘the mind’ came about when I was a teen, rising in the ranks of GoJu karate, where mind focus was an important attribute. This led me to studies into the philosophy of Bukkyo Zen and its practical mindfulness tradition. I had spent almost all of my childhood in silence, so the practice of a meditational mindfulness over three years was really a snap.

From this point on (in the 1960s) my steps toward what I am now and what I do were:

Study of Morita Therapy

Studies and practice in Zen Shiatsu

Studies and practice inAmpukuShiatsu (following the philosophy of emotional cache being found attandenarea of body)

The purpose of this post, though, is to draw your attention to the content of number 7 in the above list. It was this realization that launched my focus on the very principles that lie at the core of my work and all my philosophy of ‘the life of the mind.’ It was the reading of a few specific works by academic and clinician authors that created my own tipping point in the realization that there’s more going on within the mystery of the ‘mind chaos of everyone’ than we know about.

So, in case you’re interested in pursuing a similar path of interest and curiosity, here are some details of those works.

… just like that. No more, no less. Obvious! Think about it. So, extrapolating and summarizing his further comments,

and at six months of foetal development can understand its mother’s emotions. Prenatal neuroscientists show that even at a stage as early as 22 weeks (into gestation), the unborn child has the capacity – and uses it – to store information related to emotional (affect) experiences that it might be having, even in utero. The research proposes that at this stage in development, the limbic brain and its associated physiological links, through the central nervous system, have become fully formed, and it’s inconceivable that the complex neural system remains idle until we, as adult observers, “think” it should activate.

From Conception to Birth, by Tony Lipson. The late Dr Lipson (Dept of Genetics, The Children’s Hospital, Sydney) was a pioneer in the research into childhood maladaptions. This book is not widely-read, but there was one passage that struck me as vital. It was/is …

What are the facts? When does the spinal cord communicate with the processing and thinking part of the brain, the cerebral cortex, where the grey and white matter resides? It is only when the vital connection between the spinal cord processing centre, or the brain stem, and the brain itself is made at 22 – 23 weeks that feelings of the senses such as warmth, light, sound and pain have any real moral meaning and form part of experience. The spinal cord can then communicate with the true brain and vice versa, both responding to movement, feeling and position and presumably, albeit unconsciously, able to have memory which will influence the person for the rest of its life.”

I repeat, “… able to have memory which will influence the person for the rest of its life.” And there it lies. The formative notion that started my ball rolling in an effort to determine just ‘how’ those preverbal (maybe prenatal) experiences impacted who we are today!

Then came Daniel Goleman, who you’ll recognize for his book “Emotional Intelligence.” A few years prior to writing this socially (and professionally) ground-breaking book, Goleman wrote Vital Lies, Simple Truths: The Psychology of Self-Deception. It is my opinion that this book is far more important to the world than Emotional Intelligence.

The opening paragraph to the Introduction says it all for me. Most students and followers of my work would “get” that what he is talking about and searching for, we, in our sphere of Af-x, have indeed found. This is that paragraph….

My topic is hard to explain to you, although it is something with which we are all intimately familiar. The difficulty is that we have no precise words for it. That very fact is, in part, why it intrigues me so; there are, it seems, vital parts of our lives which are, in a sense, missing – blanks in experience hidden by holes in vocabulary. That we do not experience them is a fact which we know only vaguely, if at all. Those blanks in experience are my topic.”

What Goleman describes as holes in vocabulary can also be likened to the good old “doughnut principle.” The most obvious thing about a doughnut (donut) is its hole; the part that’s not there. If you’re trying to solve a scientific mystery or an existential mystery relating to human behaviour, then you start out always missing some data, or it wouldn’t be a mystery and open to question. The principle is just that from the shape of the hole, you can often infer a lot about the shape of the doughnut.

Let’s say the hole, the vacuum, if you like, relates to the issue of preverbal and-or prenatal affect encoding a la Janov, Damasio, Lipson, Verny and many others. Let’s say the actual meat of the doughnut – the graspable part – relates to the way that a person receives their conditioning information that leads to the establishment of belief systems throughout the early and later parts of their life. That conditioning has been “informed” (influenced) by the ineffable aspects of the hole, but those affect encodings have been just that:- influences, influencers, pattern-forming information.

One cannot say that affective encoding builds a definable structure of behaviour as life unfolds, but introduces a kind of ‘fuzzy logic’ to the way the person relates to their deeper emotional selves.

And so it went. As I put together all the research into affective neuroscience and “back there on the periphery” was my older findings about the importance of silence and the way that emotions become clearer the less ‘chatter’, I carefully constructed the genesis of what is now known as Af-x, ECR and the equiMind program.

CAREFUL STEPS

I am nothing if not “careful” and cautious when it comes to the treatment of, and influence on, other people. I abhor the great cacophony of claims and “come-hithers” of many forms of so-called therapy. From my own early times, I have believed that all therapy is auto-therapy, all help is self-help. This has informed the nature of my efforts over the decades, and my striving to create an emotional (and mental) “assistance program” that not only echoes my belief that people actually make changes for themselves rather than ‘get them from a therapist’.

Further to this, I have striven to create a treatment program that leaves the client in no doubt at all that changes that occur are of their own doing rather than mine.

As early as the formative years of the PSH approach, I instituted a system by which we could PROVE that there was merit in our approach – that we were not joining the throng of acronym-ridden therapeutic approaches that did not seek to prove or disprove their claims of success.

This involved very specific style of garnering feedback about outcomes from ex-clients. People were contacted 3 to 4 months following their therapy, by an independent (external) organization. They were asked about the results of their treatment and assured that their therapist would NOT know directly of their comments. This ESR system (Efficacy Study Research) was independently administered and is still in operation today.

My point about ‘careful steps’, then, is that from the inception of the ‘subconscious privacy’ approaches (Af-x and ECR) we have been conscientious in our attention to what has been a system that has proven that the vast majority of our clients have experienced satisfying results from their engagement with Af-x or ECR practitioners. This system of research is and has always been mandatory for practitioners in this field.

The success of the Af-x/ECR approach is underpinned by the research and neuroscientific data that describes this ‘hidden self’ – the ‘backseat driver’ in our lives. The correlation, then, between these successes and the premise of the existence of the non-verbal primary affect nucleus existing deep in our inaccessible (attempting to use words) subconscious is unassailable. We can’t deny it. The black swan is alive and well, knocking on the door of the clumsy approaches to mainstream psychology today.

My own mission is to help expose the existence of the ‘emotional core’ of the human mind – how it behaves as a ‘silent passenger’ – a back-seat driver. And that although inaccessible through ‘talk therapy’, there are ways to make positive changes to the non-verbal patterning that your mind has established. What you read above are the steps that have got us here.

More Back-Seat Drivers

HOLDING BACK POSITIVE CHANGE

It is by no means certain that our individual personality is the single inhabitant of these our corporeal frames…We all do things both awake and asleep which surprise us. Perhaps we have co-tenants in this house we live in. — Oliver Wendell Holmes US Judge, writer, poet

In the field of affectology, Af-x and ECR (Emotional Core Reframing), ‘parts drivers’ and ‘task drivers’ are defined as ‘aspects of what has been learned by your subconscious to ensure your survival and maintain your status quo’.

These parts and drivers are truly unconscious and operate silently and instantaneously whenever any external force is brought to bear – including information and/or advice. So even though there are many aspects of your subconscious that act and react in this way, let’s look at the two that are particularly germane to our work – how the unconscious processes new information and how it protects old information, right or wrong.

For decades, psychology has proposed some fairly loose concepts of what I call Parts Drivers. A number of relatively well known therapies embrace the idea that there are dynamics of the subconscious that drive or manifest certain behaviors or attitudes that tend to disallow – or sabotage – any productive change. Those therapies include the likes of –

NLP,

Analytical Hypnotherapy,

General approaches to ‘hypnosis in therapy’ that the loose church of hypnotherapists like to call hypnotherapy.

Ego State Therapy,

Transactional Analysis,

Voice Dialogue therapy,

and the list goes on and on.

But in those therapies, the approach seems to be to remove those pesky parts from your mind – you know, “discard them; get rid of them.” But what if those parts drivers have certain tasks that have been learned early in life that protect you (the organism) and are necessary for survival and reasonable functioning?

It has not been until the advent of clinical affectology that these parts drivers have gained any respect as to just how preventive they can be a ‘brake’, a hindrance on any process of change. And further, just exactly why they are necessary to your survival and what can be done to circumvent them in the interest of bringing about positive change for you and your subconscious habits. But before we address that, what are they?

It’s common for people (all of us, in fact) to use phrases like, ‘There’s a part of me that wants to do it’ and ‘That does not appeal to a part of me,’ and so on. That concept per se is not foreign to most of us; we just haven’t given a thought to the full consequences of a bunch of different ‘states of us’ running around inside our unconscious, and more to the point, these unconscious parts are silent and invisible, yet cause solid manifestations in behavioral and other ways.

Affective Neuroscience tells us that you learn many things at an early-life, preverbal feeling level that you hold on to, in one way or another (that is, solidly or subtly), well into adulthood and perhaps forever. So it is with the ‘parts’ of your unconscious that are designed – through early learning and experience – to maintain status quo for you. So it leads us to the statement,

ALL PARTS AND TASK DRIVERS ARE ‘GOOD’ AND SUPPORTIVE MOST OF THE TIME AND FOR MOST TASKS.

This comment may seem counter to what we’re attempting to achieve in psychotherapy. After all, if it’s so ‘good’ and so supportingly productive, then would we be attempting to get rid of it? The simple answer is, ‘no, we wouldn’t.’ The task in our project is to allow those highly productive and protective parts to do their jobs, but with a newer realization that the dynamics and circumstances of everyday life have moved on from the time in which they were learned and formed as unconscious reactive habits.

It’s useful for us all to develop a respect for the ‘organism-supporting’ nature of parts drivers and transfer that respect into the way that we work through an awareness relating to any attempts for you to change or ‘reframe’ your deepest emotional structure. To this end, whenever I refer to any parts driver, the comment is usually appended by:

‘It’ had (the parts driver), when it was learned, and still has, for all intents and purposes, a positive intention, however counter-productive and out-dated that may now be.

The significant parts drivers that we want to look at further are the AVOIDANCE part and the SABOTAGE part. I’m sure you recognize those parts of who you are and how you may have operated many times throughout your life. So in order to examine those two (and a few other) subconscious parts, we need to go to a more robust page …

When you’ve finished reading the material in the link above, then perhaps you can understand why it’s so important to keep in mind these ‘parts drivers’ as a part of any quality psychotherapy that you would choose for yourself.

Pharma Dirty Tricks

This post (and the included article) speaks of a topic about pharmaceutical companies that is slightly out of my field, although Big Pharma gets on my target list regarding psychopharmaceuticals and anything that changes brain chemistry (which is pretty much ANY medicine that crosses the brain blood barrier – in other words, ALL of them).

So, rather than targeting psycho-drugs here, I’m on the warpath about Pharma’s handling of the painkiller issue.

And this is unspeakable. Unconscionable. But then, we are being conditioned to accept this cynical approach toward their ‘control of the masses in order to strip our pockets!’

To precis it … a pharmaceutical company that produces “much-needed” painkillers that contain opioids (like codeine), is so concerned about its side-effects that it has decided to name the constipation so produced by its drug, as a new syndrome, or illness or condition.

As such, they have designed a new drug that “works on” the way the bowel “slows” because of opioid ingestion. The companies, AstraZeneca andDaiichi Sankyo, are the makers of Movantik, a drug designed to treat opioid-induced constipation.But Movantik specifically targets a consumer’s ability to resist addiction, making it far worse than just needing a crap! The person becomes much less addictive-resilient to all other medications, drugs, legal and otherwise. The Pharma execs say, “we need to have a drug like this to treat this side effect.”

Additionally, you might want to read here, about how Australia – specifically Tasmania, is the fourth largest producer of the opium poppy from which pharmaceutical opioids are produced. … worth $290 million to Tasmania per annum. And if you read this article, you’ll see that other parts of our country are trying to get in on the act. If that happens, and with our great expanse of arable land, we’ll become the world’s biggest grower of the opium poppy.

Is it any wonder why grumpy old dudes like me are so hot under the collar about pharmaceutical hands in our pockets and fingers down our throats, to the public’s detriment. But then, the ‘public’ doesn’t seem to give a s**t. The pun is intended.

Eli Lilly, founder of one of the biggest pharma companies in the world (that produces Prozac), said, in the 1850s, “any drug that does not have side effects is not a drug at all.”

Yes. indeed……

If you were one of the 100 million Americans who tuned in to the Super Bowl on Sunday, you probably watched a funny black-and-white commercial about a man who can’t poop. Maybe you chuckled at his struggle to find relief, his jealous reaction to a squatting dog and the toilet paper on a woman’s shoe: To many people, constipation is a joke, the unpleasant effect of eating too much pizza. But behind the poop humor is a health crisis that’s far more serious. It’s a disturbing true story about the limitations of American health care, the outsize influence of Big Pharma and the unseen trauma of illness and addiction.

The man in the commercial, titled “Envy,” is afflicted with opioid-induced constipation, a common side effect of opioid painkillers. The ad encourages viewers to talk to their physicians about medication to manage their OIC and to visit a website called OICisdifferent.com.

The estimated $5 million ad was paid for by pharmaceutical companies AstraZeneca and Daiichi Sankyo, the makers of Movantik, a drug designed to treat opioid-induced constipation. Essentially, it’s a drug that lets you more easily stay hooked on other, more addictive drugs.

The enormous marketing campaign — a TV commercial played during the most-watched TV event of the year — made it seem as though opioid addiction is a natural, widely accepted aspect of American life, the drugs as commonplace in our culture as Heinz ketchup and Bud Light. Suspicious? You have a right to be. “There must be a reason why they think it’s a smart business decision to invest that much money into an advertisement,” Marisa Hebble, director of the Opioid Task Force in northwestern Massachusetts, told Mic.

Essentially, Movantik is a drug that allows you to more easily stay hooked on other, more addictive drugs.

Opioids are at the heart of one of the country’s most pressing drug addiction problems. The number of Americans who use the opioid heroin is on the rise — as are the number of heroin-related deaths. Between 2012 and 2013, the number of U.S. heroin-related deaths nearly quadrupled, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The opioid problem is so dire, in fact, that President Barack Obama recently pledged $1.1 billion to fight it.

“More Americans now die every year from drug overdoses than they do from motor vehicle crashes,” Obama said during an October visit to Charleston, West Virginia, according to the New York Times. “The majority of those overdoses involve legal prescription drugs. I don’t have to tell you, this is a terrible toll.” This is why medical experts told Mic they were alarmed to see the ad during last night’s football game.

“In the midst of an opioid crisis, making it easier for people to stay on opioid medication is a really strange message to be sending,” Hebble said. Dr. Lewis Nelson, a professor of emergency medicine and toxicology at NYU Langone Medical Center, agreed. “It’s sad, in a way, that the use of this drug has become so prevalent that it’s worth spending several million dollars for a 30-second commercial,” he told Mic. “It’s quite sad.”

The campaign is indicative of a more widespread problem, experts told Mic.

Big Pharma keeps pushing prescription opioids. Doctors keep prescribing them for chronic pain. Patients want them because they provide a more immediate effect than exercise or dietary changes. And this unnerving statistic: The U.S. only makes up around 5% of the world’s population, but we consume80% of the world’s opioids.

All the while, the human costs are adding up.

What opioids do to your body

Addiction: Derived from the poppy plant, opioids are a family of drugs — including heroin — known to produce euphoric effects. In synthetic form, such as oxycodone and fentanyl, opioids are often prescribed to treat pain. Many Americans use prescription opioids to treat pain, without developing an addiction. But the U.S. also has a problem with prescription opioid addiction. In 2014, 1.9 million Americans had substance abuse problems involving prescription pain relievers, according to the American Society of Addiction Medicine. When opioids enter the body, they make their way to the brain, where they’re converted into morphine. Then, they bind to certain receptors in the brain, and stimulate the release of dopamine — a chemical that relieves pain and makes you feel happy. That feeling of intense pleasure is the reason why opioids are so addictive.

The No. 2 problem: They also cause constipation. “Opioids bind to opioid receptors in the gastrointestinal tract and slow down the progress of food through the bowel,” Dr. Elizabeth Drew, Medical Director of Summit Behavioral Health, told Mic via email. “This happens to everyone who takes opiates, unless they have another GI condition that may counter it.”

Nearly 100% of people taking prescription opioids experience constipation, Drew said. “It slows down transit time,” Dr. Ruth Potee, a Massachusetts family physician and the Opioid Task Force’s medical advisor, told Mic. “It’s almost like a paralyzer of the gut.”

This unpleasant side effect is so common among people who take opioids, there are numerous Reddit threads dedicated to discussing the ailment. The poop issue is real: “I’ve never been so happy to dook before in my life,” one commenter wrote. “Sometimes you go so long without an appearance, you start to wonder if the lbs of food you’ve eaten for a week straight just went into some empty black hole or if it will surely reappear soon.” When the poop is finally ready after days of constipation, it can be a painful, even frightening, experience. “Always scared when it’s time to shit,” one commenter wrote, “I just hate when that day finally comes and it is so fucking painful,” another said.

This ad “should be a wake-up call” for medicine, doctors say

Last night’s Super Bowl ad revealed one way to treat the problem: more medication. But for medical experts like Potee, it’s not an acceptable solution. “In general, adding more pills to manage the side effects of the pills you take doesn’t seem like smart medicine,” she said. If your opioids give you painful side effects, perhaps the best way to solve the problem is to not be on opioids at all, Nelson suggested.

“I think it should be a wake-up call, honestly, for the medical establishment — that that we’ve created such problems with the medications that we use, that we need to have a drug like this to treat this side effect,” he said.

“In reality, most of these people should probably be titrated off their medications,” he continued, “which is a much more holistic way of treating the problem.”

There a host of holistic ways to treat chronic pain that don’t involve addictive drugs, including yoga, massage, meditation and physical therapy. But there are problems with propagating those strategies, Hebble said. Namely, yoga studios and spas tend not to have multimillion-dollar budgets to spend on Super Bowl commercials. And then there’s the matter of health insurance, which may not cover a $150 massage as readily as a bottle of opioids. “We’ve really allowed pharmaceutical companies to have the biggest voice here,” Hebble said.

In a perfect world, Hebble told Mic, pharmaceutical companies and health insurance companies would use their money to promote awareness about the dangers of opioids, or to help underserved communities obtain access to more holistic treatments. “We need to move away from ‘there’s a pill for everything!’” she said.

Potee suggested Big Pharma put its big budget “toward doing good research toward drugs that make a difference, like a pain medication that isn’t addictive.” That $5 million Super Bowl ad budget, Potee said, “could have gone that way — toward helping people.”

The good ol’ CIA states the fact here that “Tasmania is one of the world’s major suppliers of licit opiate products …” … for the state, which grows up to 50 per cent of the planet’s legal — opiates — from which morphine, codeine and thebaine can be extracted — that relieve the pain of humans throughout the world in the form of medicines such as OxyContin and Nurofen Plus.

It’s a dangerous crop because you don’t know the alkaloid content,” says Rice. “Thebaine is like strychnine in your system.” Tasmania produces around 90 per cent of the world’s thebaine, which causes convulsions in humans at high doses. In the past two decades thebaine production has eclipsed the old favourite, morphine. A more effective painkiller, thebaine is also much more dangerous,

Australia is one of the biggest producers of legal Opium and opiates, if not the biggest. The Opium grown in Tasmania, Australia is bought by the pharmaceutical market to be turned into medicinal drugs like morphine. The Opium crop brings Tasmania millions of dollars every year and is an important industry for the island state.

Australia produces 50% of the world’s thebaine opium, and is the world’s biggest supplier.

Before researching and writing this post, it’s something I just didn’t know!

ARE YOU REALLY WHO AND WHAT YOU THINK YOU ARE?

How Your Ego Describes Yourself, “Puts yourself together.” But is it Authentic?

This, then, is the big question that is asked of you and all of us, right throughout the majority of these blog articles on HeadMend. There was a time when I wanted to – actually started to – write a book called, “If You Think You Know Who and What You Are, You’re Wrong.” Great title, but too confronting for most, I think.

Because my work is and always has been about the chasm between conscious awareness and the actuality of unconscious (or subconscious) influence, and that we do not and can not access the “form” of the influences and ‘control levers’ that those influences push and pull, then it has always led me to describe what’s going on in the inner depths of our minds as being our BACKSEAT DRIVER/S.

Did we hear that correctly? A back-seat driver?

Yes; and she or he is silent, hidden, invisible and independent of your conscious wishes; yet still holds a tighter grip on the reins of your life!

If I were to ask you, “who’s really in charge of your mental states, your emotions, the choices you make, your personal characteristics and behaviors?” you’d probably reply, “I am.” It takes a pretty brave soul to admit, “no idea. I know I think I am, but I do suspect there are forces within me over which I have no conscious control.” These ‘forces’ – our back seat drivers – are responsible for all the difficult habits in our lives, our less-than-lovable traits and characteristics, and the sorts of emotional responses and states that create sadness, stress and difficulties with how and who we are and how we run our relationships with others.

Recent Posts

Two Minds

Neuroscience has shown that there exists a distinct separation of the human conscious and unconscious 'minds' to the mutual exclusion of each – wholly segregated with no possibility of interrelationship in the way that psychological analysis has always claimed as “method.”
Where people develop lives with symptoms and problems, gifts and abilities, we know that the emotional subconscious is a set of natural patterns that are inaccessible through conscious or cognitive analysis (using word constructs).